The story is the link

2013 brought with it more work in and amongst editorial processes for Mark Boulton Design. And with it, some challenges designing systems that can react to the speed of the story.

News happens quickly and therefore needs to be captured quickly. This is why news organisations have latched onto the immediacy of publishing platforms like Twitter, blogs, Instagram and the like. The flow from story to pixel is dramatically reduced compared to incombant editorial processes. Sure, journalists will cry of the death of proper journalism; story-telling will suffer at the hands of snippets of information drip-fed to hungry millenials. We've all heard the horror stories. The truth is that these services allow for a story to happen in near real-time, and as such, the emphasis on an editor's work is no longer writing, but on guiding, the story. Creating connections between content to build a bigger picture in the reader's mind, but, certainly, in a near-live environment, many news organisations are not authoring this content; it's being created elsewhere by other people.

I've had a long-standing professional interest in content management systems. I've designed a few along the way, and almost without exception, the project has started as a software design project, and ended up a process design problem. The problems lie with people, not with user interfaces or technology.

So much has changed in the ‘electronic publishing’ landscape in the last year. For every month of 2013 there was a hot new writing application, hip new publishing platform or collaboration silver bullet for writers, newsrooms and media organisation to run through the mill. Tools and applications for content publishing had matured in such a short period of time, individually they lacked the cross workflow power to be of complete use to a newsroom like The Guardian’s, but collectively it was starting to look a lot more interesting.

He goes on to say:

The software requirements for a modern, paper producing newsroom, are vast. The needs of the newsroom are increasingly difficult to define due to the nuances in production processes across desks, publications and offices, a moving target that is getting faster by the day.

In my experience, the faster and more important a story was, the less likely it was to follow established processes – especially where convoluted and difficulty to use software was concerned. It quickly devolved into Post-it Notes, hushed whispers and hurried editing. News journalists are human, and sometimes the speed of the story is just too fast for software. It gets in the way.

Given the change in how this type of content is created, curated, edited, processed and published, more and more organisations are finding they need new tools. New content management systems to help solve their publishing problems. My fear is, they're looking in the wrong place.

Last year, I spoke at Handheld conference about how content is created over time. How a story moves from being a snowflake to a snowball; gathering pace, other content, debris. Before an editor knows it, the story is no longer a page, but a bunch of different things: links, images, words, video, other articles, tweets, blog posts. The list goes on. But they all share two things in common: the topic of the story, and the link between them. This is where I feel we need to focus our attention.

The hyperlink is at the very core of what the web is: an interconnected hyperlinked bunch of resources. The hyperlink is everything to the web, yet it is the thing we take the least care of. URLs die. Links rot. This isn't a post about digital preservation, or a rant about how we should be taking care of these links for future generations, but that we should be taking care of them now!. As I hope I've demonstrated, the link between content is going to become increasingly important as we create more fragmented and modular content for display in multiple contexts. If we don't look after these links, the story will be lost. Because the story isn't a page anymore. The story is the link.

Modern content management systems should be focussed on exposing links between content. Making it easy for editors and journalists to make connections between things and not just when a story is created; stories live over many days, weeks, months or years. Modern content management systems should allow for constant editorial iteration and creation by showing the links between things.

It's interesting to me to see this happen in a parallel industry. Just as designers and developers are struggling to adapt to the increasingly rapid changing web, writers and journalists are, too. Creating news content for the web is no longer about writing a page and hitting publish. It requires a fastidious approach to content curation over a longer period of time. It means being where your readers are; Twitter, Facebook, the TV. It requires pulling together all the various fragments of a story into a cohesive narrative. Now, does that sound like your CMS is designed to help? No. I thought not.